At the 1999 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia, I heard a good deal about Catherine McMullen, the eleven-year-old daughter of Australian SF writer Sean McMullen, who had just sold her first story to a professional science fiction magazine. Such accounts of child prodigies in the SF business always catch my attention, since I made my own start at an early age, as have a good many others in the field. But none of us can match the prodigiousness of young Ms. McMullen, who now, at the age of fourteen or so, is evidently still selling stories at a steady clip and settling down to a robust career. She is the newest and most spectacular in a long series of such prodigies in our field, going back to the time when Hugo Gernsback invented science fiction magazines in 1926. Starting young is a grand and glorious tradition for us.

Consider the case of Isaac Asimov, whose name adorns this very magazine. Isaac, born in 1920, sold his first story, "Marooned off Vesta," in October, 1938, when he was still a few months short of nineteen. By the time he was twenty-one he had written the novella "Nightfall," one of science fiction’s all-time classics. (His friends were fond of telling him that his career had been going straight downhill from there for decades. You can imagine how amused by that he was.)

Then there is the wondrous Jack Williamson, born in 1908, who wrote "The Metal Man" the year he turned twenty and saw it published in Gernsback’s Amazing Stories before he was twenty-one. (The extraordinary thing about Williamson is that he would live long enough to become a senior prodigy too. In 2001, at the age of ninety-three, he became the oldest writer ever to win a Hugo award– named for Amazing’s founder–when his story "The Ultimate Earth" was voted best novella of the year.)

Jack Williamson was twenty-seven years old, and Isaac Asimov fifteen, the year I was born, and I was thirteen when I began sending my first stories to the editors of the SF magazines. They sent them right back, of course. But at the Asimovian age of eighteen I actually sold one (a novel, no less, Revolt on Alpha C), and then a bunch of stories, and by the time I was twenty-one I had won a Hugo as the most promising new author of the year. A fast start indeed, though not quite as fast as Isaac’s, since I wrote nothing that year that would be remembered as long as "Nightfall" has been.

But the annals of science fiction publishing are full of tales of youthful prodigies. Some went on to long and glorious careers; others are mere footnotes in the history books now.

In the first category we find Samuel R. Delany, whose first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was published when he was twenty, in 1962, and whose book Babel-17 brought him a Nebula at twenty-five. We have Ray Bradbury, twenty-one when his first story, "Pendulum," appeared in the long-forgotten Super Science Stories. There was John Brunner, seventeen when his pseudonymous first novel, Galactic Storm, appeared, and nineteen when his novella "Thou Good and Faithful" appeared in Astounding SF, the leading magazine of its era. Harlan Ellison, twenty-one in 1955, sold "Glowworm," his first, to Infinity SF, and went on to sell dozens more in the next year or two. And let us not forget our very own Gardner Dozois, not just a Hugo-caliber editor but a distinguished SF writer, who was eighteen when he sold his first story, "The Empty Man," published in 1966 and nominated for a Nebula.

But then we have George F. Locke, who was fifteen, in 1926, when his story "Smoke Rings" appeared in his high school literary magazine under the pseudonym of "George McLociard." Hugo Gernsback thought it was good enough to reprint in Amazing in 1928, when its author was still only seventeen, and went on to buy three more from him. But the name of George McLociard was not heard of in science fiction again after 1931.

Another Gernsback phenomenon was G. Peyton Wertenbaker, born in 1907, who at the age of 16 was selling stories to Gernsback’s popular science magazine, Science and Invention, that would be reprinted a few years later in Amazing. From 1926 to 1930 Wertenbaker was one of Gernsback’s most popular authors, and several of his stories were reprinted in anthologies decades later. But his career as a science fiction author was over by the time he was twenty-four, though he lived until 1968.

Then we have the sad tale of Charles Cloukey, who was granted just twenty years on this planet, from 1912 to 1932. At sixteen his story "Paradox" appeared in one of Gernsback’s magazines, and it was quickly followed by two sequels that seemed to be establishing him as a master of the time-travel story. But then there were no more. A similar trajectory, back in those ancient days, was traced by David R. Daniels (1915-1936), who published five well-liked stories in swift succession in 1935 and 1936 before taking his own life.

Allow me a few more excursions into Paleozoic science fiction:

–Frank K. Kelly, born in 1914, a contributor to Gernsback’s Wonder Stories by 1931, the author of the wildly popular "Star Ship Invincible" four years later, gave up science fiction at that point and went on to a distinguished career elsewhere, with material published in The New Yorker, Esquire, etc. His memoir of his days as a young science fiction writer, "My Interplanetary Teens," was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1947.

–P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974), who began selling stories to Gernsback in his teens, wrote a number of memorable stories in the 1930s and 1940s, and then gave up writing fiction altogether, though he ran the book review column in Astounding for many years and was a familiar face at SF conventions until his death.

–John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971), who sold "When the Atoms Failed" to Amazing in 1929, when he was nineteen, went on to become one of the two or three best SF writers of the decade while still in his twenties, and at age twenty-seven became editor of Astounding Stories, which he would turn into the dominant magazine of the field.

–Charles D. Hornig, not a writer, but a prodigy of a different sort, the youngest SF editor ever. In 1933, when he was seventeen, Hornig, who was publishing an amateur magazine called The Fantasy Fan, sent a copy to Gernsback, who happened to be looking for a new editor just then. He was so impressed with Hornig’s magazine that he sent for him and hired him, and until 1936, when the magazine was sold, Hornig was Wonder Stories’ editor. (For some of that time he attended evening classes in order to finish high school while editing for Gernsback during the day.)

When a host of new pulp SF magazines came into being in the early 1940s, another crowd of youthful editors, though not quite as young as Hornig had been, entered the field: Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, and Robert W. Lowndes, a trio of friends who belonged to the same SF club in New York. Pohl (who had had a poem accepted by Amazing when he was sixteen, in 1936), became the editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories four years later. Wollheim, who had sold a story to Gernsback when he was seventeen, in 1934, was named editor of Stirring Science Stories and Cosmic Stories in 1941, at twenty-four. Lowndes, also twenty-four in 1941, took over the editorship of Future Fiction, which Charles Hornig had founded after leaving Gernsback. All three young editors wrote stories for each other’s magazines, and also published the work of their even younger friends: Damon Knight (born 1922, first published story 1941), James Blish (born 1921, first published story 1940), and Cyril Kornbluth (born 1923, and just sixteen when he started selling to Pohl’s Super Science in 1940.) All these magazines were swept away within a couple of years by the paper shortages brought by World War II, but, of course, Pohl, Wollheim, Lowndes, Blish, Knight, and Kornbluth went on to significant SF careers in the postwar world.

We find plenty of early starters in that postwar era, too: not just the aforesaid Brunner, Ellison, Silverberg, and Delany, but also Algis Budrys, twenty-one at the time of his first sale in 1952; Jane Gaskell, whose first novel, Strange Evil, written at fourteen, was published two years later in 1957; Terry Prat-chett, not quite fifteen when he sold his first short story to the British magazine Science Fantasy; Bruce McAllister, who launched his career in 1963, at seventeen, and has been publishing SF sporadically ever since (he was most recently here in Asimov’s in 1993); Greg Bear, sixteen when his first story, "Destroyers," appeared in 1967; and–one that I remember only too well–Joel Nydahl, who was all of thirteen in 1953 when he sold "Lesson for Today" to a well-known magazine of that time, Imagination. That one left its mark on me, and on Harlan Ellison as well, because we both were on the thresholds of our own careers then, Harlan almost nineteen and I six months younger, but neither of us had quite managed to make that first sale yet–and here was this newcomer, this bright kid Nydahl, whom we both had met through the channels of amateur science fiction publishing, vaulting past us both and selling a story! (As it turned out, it was his first and last sale; he opted for an academic career instead. But he turned up, retired now from university life, at the 2001 World SF Convention, and for all I know is planning to return to writing science fiction after an interruption of half a century.)

The list of early starters stretches on and on, longer than I have room for–Michael Moorcock, Tom Disch, Brian Stableford, Mark Geston, Stephen Donaldson, etc., etc., etc., etc. Not everyone, of course, who sets out to be a precocious science fiction writer makes the grade right away. Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, was an utter failure as a prodigy: she sent a story to John W. Campbell’s Astounding when she was eleven, in 1950, got it rejected, and struggled through a terrible decade of unpublishedness before breaking in, finally, at twenty-three by selling a short story to the long-vanished magazine Fantastic. I understand that she’s done fairly well since then, however.

But science fiction remains as hospitable to eerily youthful writers today as it was in Gernsback’s time. Even now, I suspect, some glinty-eyed ten-year-old is stuffing a manuscript into a manila envelope addressed to Mr. Gardner Dozois, The Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction–and with that precocious submission, what future Hugo winner, his or her hour come round at last, slouches toward Asimov’s to be born?